Worried about drunk drivers and speeders crashing and killing people, the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission gave the New Orleans Police Department $288,414 in 2011 to help deal with the problem.

In the end, the department not only failed to collect more than $59,000 of the grant that could have been used to cover traffic officers' overtime pay, but it also failed to catch an officer who is now accused of falsely reporting his overtime hours under that program, according to a new report released Wednesday (May 7) by Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux's office.

That officer in question retired in May 2011 and is a member of the NOPD Reserves, but the report did not identify him. A footnote stated that Quatrevaux turned over his evidence to his counterpart with the state Department of Transportation & Development. The NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau has launched its own investigation, according to the report.

NOPD did not respond Tuesday to a request from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune for the officer's name.

The auditors found 86 patrols had been improperly filed with the highway commission, resulting in $2,724 left on the table. Extrapolated across the price tag of the entire grant, that deficit added up to $59,325 that the NOPD spent without asking the state for reimbursement, according to the report.

In its response, the NOPD blamed the city's outdated payroll program for the billing errors, but offered several new safeguards to better control the grant program. For example, officers who issue traffic tickets will have to do so from a "personal issue" citation book that would be cross-referenced with a spreadsheet maintained by the department's grant supervisors. The practice ostensibly should give the NOPD a clearer picture of who is working overtime by tracking the legitimacy of the citations.

The auditors also found that the NOPD had not properly recorded the
serial number of a computer bought under the grant program.